Airbnb’s Promise: Every Man and Woman a Hotelier

Recent advertisements in New York City for Airbnb, the online lodging site, portray the business as a valuable community service.

Andrew Renneisen / The New York Times

July 3, 2014

Big City

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

In recent weeks, Airbnb, the online lodging site and popular Silicon Valley emblem of the sharing-loving-trusting-hugging-anyone-can-be-Conrad-Hilton economy, unveiled a promotional campaign in New York aimed at getting doubters to see what a valuable social function the company performs. In a series of ads, visible mostly in subway stations, Airbnb hosts of various races and creeds are depicted in the unpretentious living quarters they rent out — in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn, in Astoria, Queens — over text explaining that Airbnb not only provides tens of thousands of New Yorkers with supplemental income, but also “strengthens our communities.”

A television spot, Airbnb’s first, depicts an African-American woman named Carol wearing a dashiki and arranging flowers in her Lower East Side home. She is shown extending her hospitality to out-of-town guests for whom she makes pancakes. We learn that her husband died, she has grown sons and her employment vanished. Airbnb made possible both her survival and, we’re meant to understand, her pursuit of graduate education in divinity.

The company operates in 34,000 cities, and of those, Airbnb has had the most trouble securing the affections of local governments in Barcelona, San Francisco and New York City, where the state attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, who has described the Internet as “one of the primary crime scenes of the 21st century,” has sought to limit the company’s influence. The hippie entrepreneurialism embodied by Internet ventures like Airbnb is not the most obvious target for an office that once, more usefully, imagined Wall Street as the century’s greatest theater of malfeasance. But the attorney general and other officials don’t easily gravitate toward the company’s argument for civic good.

Occasionally events transpire that would seem to substantiate their reservations. In March, a Chelsea man, returning home to the apartment he had rented to someone who said he was looking for a place for his in-laws to stay while they were in town for a wedding, found instead an orgy that left him throwing sheets over all of his furniture in disgust. (Referring to the participants, The New York Post inimitably described this as an “overweight orgy.”) In 2010, two years after Airbnb was created, the New York State Legislature strengthened the statute related to the operation of illegal hotels, which are essentially defined as apartments or rooms rented out for fewer than 30 days. Believing that anyone ought to be able to rent out a home, Airbnb would like to see that law overturned.

When a company valued at $10 billion clamors about government interference as it positions itself so we might view it as an agent in the war against inequality, there are obvious reasons to be suspicious. The benefits of the sharing economy can redound, after all, only to those with actual assets to share. Part of the impetus for the 2010 law in New York were the concerns that short-term rentals were depleting the city’s housing stock and that profits were accruing to landlords with multiple apartments who foresaw greater gains serving tourists than those who lived here.

But when Airbnb conducted a survey of its participants in the city last year, it says, it found that 87 percent were renting out their primary residences. Moreover, 62 percent claimed that hosting guests through Airbnb helped them afford to remain in their homes, and almost half of hosts who reported earnings had household incomes at or below the city’s average. A map of available Airbnb spaces for rent throughout the city reveals them to be spread out, beyond the obvious upper-middle-class enclaves: on Staten Island, in parts of the Bronx and in East New York, Brooklyn. The hotel industry has been bedeviled by the company, but clearly traditional accommodations are not under any real threat. Over the past year, hotel demand has increased in the city, not diminished. Airbnb users are coming to the city when they seemingly wouldn’t otherwise be able to bear the expense. At a moment when a sector of Midtown Manhattan is becoming a vast condominium complex for foreign billionaires who will alight in the city only when the spirit moves them and only when they don’t find themselves in Singapore, Mustique or Rio, it is worth considering the value of democratizing the tourist class. One kind of tourist will ensure the survival of a bookstore like Rizzoli, and another will ensure that it is replaced with someplace to buy $15,000 watches.

Part of what regulators don’t like about Airbnb is the sense that it promotes transience, and all the problems attendant to it, in buildings intended as permanent residences. But how many of them have raised a fuss about the erection of high-rises that serve as de facto resorts for the global aristocracy? Michael R. Bloomberg supported the law against short-term rentals as he wished for every rich Russian bachelor to move into One57. Maybe everyone will be happy to tolerate orgies there because the participants will be skinnier.